Who is bar italia?

“I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape.” So goes the opening lines of Patrick Modiano’s French mystery Missing Person. The novel follows a recently retired private detective, hunting down fragments of a past, an identity, he has since forgotten. The protagonist, Guy Roland, has amnesia, and the missing person is himself.

I, too, am on the hunt for a lost identity. Every night I am haunted by the elusive band bar italia. Their latest single, ‘banks’, dropped earlier this year, and has brought new eyes and ears on them. But minimal photos of or information about the band exists online. Who are they? Where did they come from? And why do they keep themselves so hidden?

I first discovered bar italia midway through last year, when I came across a Twitter thread where their song ‘rage quit’ had been posted..It was love at first listen, and I soon binged all their albums and added almost every one of their songs to my playlists. Their sound was unlike anything I had heard before. The vocals rough and mumbly, the instrumentals scratchy, abrasive and distorted. Their album covers largely consisted of Microsoft Paint drawings of stick figures, or a weird pencil drawing of a beetle. If this band was anything, it wasn’t normal.

When asked, barely anyone knew they existed. I recommended bar italia to everyone I knew, but when pressed on who they were, I was stumped. I needed to find out more about them, and writing for SURG, I thought now was the perfect opportunity to reach out for an interview. Finding their email, I sent them an interview request, but did not receive a response.

It was time for me to play detective, and to treat this with the severity of a missing persons case, much like Guy Roland. I would crunch the numbers, I would trace calls, I would hang out in dimly lit bars and alleys and drink myself silly. I would find out who is bar italia.

First, I did what any good investigation by a USyd student publication would start with, and searched Google. But the band’s socials are upsettingly sparse. Their Instagram account is virtually a ghost town of low quality images, accompanied by YouTube links for their songs. One post features a blurry image of a trio of people walking in the street: the cover for their latest single ‘banks’.

UK record shop Boomkat’s review of the 2020 LP ‘Quarrel’ points us in the right direction, though.

Depending on what forum thread your checking, bar italia may be an as-yet-uncredited Blunt work, some new Mica Levi project or possibly something by the likes of Brynje’s Asger Hartvig (MC Boli), but naming games aside, it’s a typically louche and wonky-hearted set of indie-pop that slots somewhere between Joanne Robertson’s puckered songcraft and the likes of Blunt’s grunge on the World Music roster.

Blunt, Mica Levi, MC Boli, Joanne Robertson, World Music. All these names began floating around in my head. I felt I had simultaneously moved both ten steps forward and twenty steps back. I needed to create some sort of pin board of photos, thumb tacks and lines of string.

Let’s knock off the obvious ones. Mica Levi is an English singer, songwriter and composer. They’ve composed scores for films like Under the Skin and Jackie. The likelihood that Levi would dwell in obscurity or work on a project like this following a BAFTA win seems highly unlikely, but not improbable. In regards to MC Boli, their sound just doesn’t quite match up with what bar italia is going for.

Spotting the band’s label on Boomkat, and then cross referencing that with their page on Bandcamp, led me to World Music. Dean Blunt (real name Roy Nnawuchi) is a record producer, singer/songwriter and conceptual artist. They are responsible for various avant-garde collectives and collaborations such as Hype Williams, Blue Iverson and Babyfather.

Through websites such as Rate Your Music (RYM) and Discogs, I was able to trace the band members to the artist Nina Cristante, as well as Jezmi Taarik and Sam Fenton, who make up the double act Double Virgo. Cristante was known previously for her solo work and collaborations with Blunt under the name NINA.

I was getting closer and closer to my goal. I had found names, and all their music was virtually prototypes for what would come to be bar italia’s sound. But I couldn’t get this niggling thought out of my mind that this was all still too fragmented. The lack of any real bios or descriptions on their SoundCloud (or any other platform, for that matter) , their declining of my interview – it all seemed fishy to me. Much like Guy Roland, I began doubting myself.

Was the image of the band I was piecing together really them, or was I making pieces fit in order to construct this image in my mind?

The band had one clear photo of them on Last.fm. Even then, it was still hard to decipher. I needed videographic proof. I needed them to be in the flesh, for others to see them too. Lucky for me, on April 14th they performed at Avalon Cafe, a small bar in London, alongside Still House Plants (another mystery for another day). ‘I”ve got you now, you bastards”, I thought to myself upon seeing them advertise the event.

Although I couldn’t travel all the way to London for one gig, the Dean Blunt Reddit community went out in droves. Finally, Redditors were useful for something. Videos went live – both ones filmed in the audience and screen recordings of the Instagram stories of people in attendance. bar italia could no longer escape from the digital panopticon.

Just as suspected, Double Virgo and Nina Cristante were the members of bar italia, as recordings from multiple angles in full motion showed us. They had been dragged out from behind the proverbial curtain. But another pressing question pursed my lips: How did they sound live? Opinions were split as to how the evening went, with some users disappointed that the band didn’t sound as good as their studio recordings, whereas others enjoyed their performance thoroughly. Some were just riding the high of seeing them in the flesh. Recordings didn’t do much to help the band’s case, but hey, a band that already sounds rough around the edges probably won’t sound the best when recorded through an iPhone microphone.

As with all mysteries, there is both a sense of relief but also disappointment at their identities being revealed. Catharsis swept over me at finally seeing them perform, even if it was through the digital ether. But I also didn’t want this mystery to end. I was almost hoping for it to be kept secret, for their gig to be a fakeout, and bar italia to never reveal their identities at all.

I wanted this story to end like Guy Roland’s, simultaneously closer to solving his missing identity yet further away than when he started. Nevertheless, I will still listen to and enjoy their music, and I’ve now become a fan of the individual band members’ previous work, along with the work of World Music’s entire roster of artists. Alongside this, I can take solace in the fact I have grown more knowledgeable and a little closer to a band that I hold close to my heart.

Listen to bar italia here.